21 May 2006

I know I shouldn't let it bother "I," but . . .

I came home from seeing my girlfriend and turned on C-Span 2 to see what was playing on Book TV. CNN reporter Anderson Cooper was on promoting his new book, Dispatches From the Edge. He talked about his father, something anecdotal. I didn't really pay attention until he mentioned a book that his father had written for his brother and him, expressed as, "my father had written the book for my brother and I." My brother and I? He said this, not once, but twice! Am I the only one raising eyebrows at this?

I've lived a short life, so it's possible that what appear to be trends may, in fact, be tendencies going back years and years. There is, for example, the mistaken notion that modern American students know less about their history than those of previous generations, an idea based on the greater difficulty of old history exams. As the historian Sam Wineburg pointed out about two and a half years ago when he was a guest on Washington Journal, however, students back then failed those tests abysmally as well.

The trend I've been suspecting has been a seeming response to grammarians pointing out the incorrectness of "Me and someone" as a compound subject in a sentence: "Me and Vladimir went out for a beer." Those who practice proper grammar would correctly point out that it is "Vladimir and I . . ." I've noticed that in the past decade or so, in what seems to be an ironic attempt at good grammar, people have begun using "I" as an object pronoun. They obviously think they sound smart when they do it. It's very simple: "I" is a subject pronoun; "me" is an object pronoun." The subject acts; the object receives the action, directly or indirectly. It's "My father wrote the book for my brother and me," dickhead!

A respected journalist like Cooper, of all people, should not be committing this error. Keep in mind that garnering respect should not necessarily mean that one actually deserves it. I shouldn't be so bothered. Perhaps I'm just jealous because public accolades are given to people like Cooper and not to I.

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